Got Soul?

It's 2:41...it's been a long week, but I can't sleep yet. After reading The first two meditations of Descartes I've been perplexed with the concept of a soul. So, I'll hunker down in the laundry room with some apple jacks and we'll see if I can get to the bottom of this. If not the bottom, somewhere. As long as I don't go in circles and some conclusion materializes I can call this blog post a success.
First of all, I have to state a grievance I have with Descartes concerning Meditations I and II. Aside from being terribly hard to follow, he makes a few contradictions. The most problematic for me is the many assumptions he makes concerning his religious background. This is not to bash his faith, in fact I admire it. This guy searches for answers through logic, yet he stays true to his roots. Bravo. However, listen to this:
" I was convinced of the necessity of undertaking once in my life to rid myself of all the opinions I had adopted, and of commencing anew the work of building from the foundation, if I desired to establish a firm and abiding superstructure in the sciences" (Descartes, Med. I).

How can he build himself a new foundation in building a tower to the sun of knowledge mentioned centuries earlier in Plato's Republic if he constantly refers back to the assumptions implanted in his head by religious teachings?

For now, I'm not going to dwell on that. First and foremost this blog entry is to explore the notion of a soul. In our class discussion we came to the conclusion (however vague and ambiguous that conclusion may be) that the soul is not of this world. It is beyond the physical realm. Here's the trouble...I honestly don't know how we reached this assumption, and assumptions are something I would like to avoid all together. I called Descartes out for making assumptions, and I'm no hypocrite. So why isn't a soul a physical thing, or a thing at all? Dammit...Houston we have a problem: how do I know I have a soul?

Descartes "proves" that the soul...or mind (that's just his word for it) exists by first posing the idea that nothing physical exists. This is an undeniable possibility. Sure we could get into that Inception or Matrix mumbo jumbo, or I could just site a real life example from my own experiences. As a child I had chronic night-terrors, the psychological reasoning behind why I had these episodes is irrelevant and just another boring sob story, so I'll stray from that. However, these night-terrors felt like reality, just as sitting in front of this computer listening to the hum of the washing-machines feels like a present reality. Reality check: according to Descartes himself what I consider "reality" may be in question. In his Meditations, or from what I read of them (there's a ton, and they're all designed like a logic labyrinth), Descartes basically convinces himself that he could very well be dreaming; his physical body might not actually exist, or at least not as he perceived it during his writing. By this point I'm thinking get on with it already man, I get it, there's no obvious or easy way to prove or disprove that all of what I am currently doing (physically) is or isn't a dream. Blah, blah, yawn, snore.

Now Descartes may have a very round about way of making a point, but he is one smart son of a bitch. He makes the assertion that because he is doubting the existence of the physical realm he must exist, for how can something that doesn't exist doubt anything. Nothing does not doubt, nothing does not exist. So, to doubt=to exist. This existence is the existence of a "soul" or "mind". Why? Because if we doubt our physical bodies but believe we exist because of this doubt, what is our existence comprised of? The answer is beyond our realm of conception, so to understand it better, to label it, to sort of bound some of this wild discourse we call it the soul. Okay, it took long enough to justify the belief of our existence through the form of a soul...but what is it I'm actually blogging about here? I've lost sight in this thick fog of doubt.
Somehow Descartes, the guy that bases his existence on doubt, is still a believer in The Almighty. I can just see Professor McKinney clasping her hands together and establishing this point as "interesting" or "intriguing". Makes sense anyways, because I was certainly baffled, bewildered even, when I reached this conclusion.

I'm about to tread some dangerous waters here, walk a slippery slope, if you know what I mean. Know where I'm going with this? Give you a hint: Namaste. You've probably seen the movie Avatar (James Cameron's, not the last air bender), right? Remember how the big blue hippies monkey things say "I see you" to each other as a sign of respect and compassion? Yeah, that's essentially what Namaste means. Really when you say "Namaste" to someone you are acknowledging that the God in you recognizes the God in them. I'd love to connect this to the previously mentioned rough sketch of a soul. Wouldn't it be great to greet people by saying "Hi, my soul recognizes your soul". What a great ice-breaker...but can the connection be made? We'll see, I'm (obviously) spit balling here.

The Slippery Slope:

For the record, I am not trying to prove or disprove the existence of God, I am merely attempting to make a connection between the existence of our souls to the concept of The Almighty. We know have souls because we doubt our physical existence. This also suggests that these souls are beyond the physical realm, because for all we know the physical realm is an illusion. Therefore we must accept the existence of a realm beyond the one we can perceive. Good, I think I'm on the right track here. Now, I don't really want to get into where our souls came from, who/what created them, and why...I'm already on a slippery slope, that would just lube the cliff I'm climbing. I feel I'm at an impasse. Shit.

Okay, it's 4:03am...I have come to the conclusions (with the help of Descartes doubt) that I exist beyond this physical realm in the form of a soul, whatever that may be. Also I must accept that there is a realm beyond the physical, the one in which my soul resides. This realm may be related to the concept of Namaste and The Almighty, but that is way too much to tackle a few hours from day break.
I know I have a soul; successful blog post.

Namaste,

T

Plato called it "Good", I call it Love.

My brain is literally still buzzing from today's discussion in class today. Our reading assignment was Plato's allegory of the cave, from The Republic, which seemed straight forward enough at first glance.
To very briefly summarize, Plato paints a scene of prisoners chained to a cave wall. A fire casts shadows of everything in the cave against the ground and the walls, and these shadows are all the prisoners can see, and have seen. To the prisoners the shadows in this cave are their reality. They don't see a person, they see a shadow of a person. Likewise, they don't see their own reflection, they see their shadow. But to them, this is reality.
Plato then suggests that one of the prisoners is released from the cave into the world. He would be blind from the light of the sun, but will slowly gain normal vision and see this new reality he has been brought to. The last thing he is able to perceive is the sun; the very thing that gives him the light to perceive his surroundings, creates seasons, grows trees, etc.
Here's a direct quote from Francis Cornford's translation of The Republic:
"In the world of knowledge, the last thing to be perceived and only with great difficulty is the essential Form of Goodness...this is the cause of whatever is right and good" (The Republic, 231).

So...Plato is suggesting that in our current state of mind we cannot fully realize that "essential Form of Goodness". He doesn't even define it, which at first seemed problematic to me. Here I am thinking: this guy pulls the rug out from under us, tells us we're living in some lower state of consciousness, but doesn't bother defining the goal of this journey towards enlightenment (what the hell is enlightenment anyways?) The concept seemed ridiculous to me. I was blinded by the light of this "Goodness".

In class Professor McKinney told everyone to draw her chair "exactly as they saw it". This was to literally illustrate our subjective nature in our current state. I saw the chair differently that the girl sitting across the room saw it, therefore our pictures looked different (also, my picture looked like crap, I'm a poet, not a painter). I started getting excited, sitting there in class, because I felt one step ahead. As soon as the word subjective is mentioned my mind starts swimming with terms like cultural relativism, and perspective. I quickly wrote in my notebook: If everything is subjective/relative what is true?
Objectivity.
That's why Plato didn't define "Goodness". He couldn't define it in such a way that is comprehensible by those of us still dwelling in the cave! If it's the last thing realized in a quest for enlightenment how could anyone expect him to tell us what it was. It's beyond this realm. We see things from our point of view, based on where we are, how we were raised, the mood we're in, our experiences. Right now we are subjective beings. I see what I see, not what you see. I'm getting ahead of myself, I haven't properly defined objectivity, merely implied its definition. For something to be objective it must be independent of our reality. This changes everything. Professor McKinney suggests that once this "Goodness" is achieved we realize true happiness. Sure I buy that. The word Nirvana is ringing through my head. Some of my classmates struggle with this idea. They say things like: "How can that make me happy?" "Happiness to me is different than happiness to someone else". They have a point, although it's shallow. The kind of happiness they are talking about is personal, subjective, opinionated. The happiness achieved through enlightenment is universal, timeless, and most importantly objective. It relates to Nirvana, Heaven, Good Karma, all that spiritual whatnot (I'm not getting into that specifically right now, maybe in a later post).

Here's something that's been stuck in my head since 12:15 today. Love. I'm not talking about corny one liners in romantic comedies, be my valentine baby, shallow pop songs, none of that. I'm talking Love with a capital 'L'. That kind of objective Love can relate to the quest for enlightenment Plato was talking about. In fact, I think it's what pushes us towards that "Goodness" he spoke about back in the day. Don't believe me? Listen to this:

There's nothing you can do that can't be done,
Nothing you can sing that can't be sung,
Nowhere you can be that isn't where you're meant to be,
It's easy.
All you need is Love.

I don't know how much John and Paul studied Plato, but they hit the nail on the head. This song is about the Love that drives us to enlightenment. Universal, objective, timeless Love. Sure, it might be a little vague, it's hard to describe something so vast in a blog...or at all for that matter. Some would say this song is about "fate", that everything is predetermined for us, but I disagree. To me, the song tells us that if we cut the crap, cut the subjectivity, and act out of Love we're doing things right, and we're on our path out of the cave.
If I had this mindset earlier when asked to draw the chair I may have piped up and said I couldn't, not because of my lackluster art skills, but because how can I capture the true essence of that chair in a simple drawing? How could the drawing even compare to the chair? It's 1 dimensional. The drawing of the chair would be more like the drawing of the chair's shadow, and that's how I know I'm still in the cave.

Until my next mind altering epiphany,
T

First entry

Well...I have a blog now. Not really sure what that means, but I do know that this will just contribute to my chronic insomnia. I created this blog for my Philosophy class at Txstate (we're supposed to blog or philosophical thoughts on stuff from class) but I think it's going to turn into more that that.
It's ten till three, and I have class in the morning, but this is my first blog entry so I better do it right...whatever that means.
I wrote a song tonight, which isn't that exciting if you're a musician, but this song was slightly different. Basically every song I've ever written is a love song, that's pretty much to be expected from me, and I always loved songs with girls' names in them. "Martha My Dear", "Maggie May", "Lola" (that's not really a girl, but you get it right?). Anyways...they seem more personal, ya know? I never really accomplished that until tonight. To get to the point, my girlfriend's name is Jacqui, which is a great name, and I had every reason in the world to dedicate the majority of a song to her name, so I'm not really sure why it took so damn long. I was working on an unfinished piece, and all of the sudden it clicked: HER MIDDLE NAME RHYMES WITH HER FIRST NAME. It was so obvious. Jacqui Marie. That's a hit worthy title (not that the marketability of the song was on my mind...I record my music in a dorm basement for crying out loud).
Jacqui
Jacqui Marie
I give my heart, all of my soul
To thee.
So the song sounds pretty killer, and she likes what I've showed her, so maybe if I can figure out how to post it on here I'll do that one of these days.
Until then, here's my Facebook music site.

Peace and Love,
T